I first met Maggie Shipstead in 2011 when she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She had not yet published her first novel, Seating Arrangements, which would later become a New York Times bestseller, but even then the magnitude of her ambition, shrewdness, and intellectual generosity was evident. After her first book debuted in […]

The Music Hall of Detroit has commissioned a ballet tribute to David Bowie. Complexions Contemporary Ballet will debut their work at the Music Hall on June 18, with the final piece incorporating interpretations of Bowie’s work alongside that of Metallica (although little explanation is being offered about the pairing).

At Vela Magazine, Leslie Kendall Dye discusses living with her mother who has dementia, and the connection between her mother and her own daughter: After dinner, I watch my mother and child play in my daughter’s shoe-box room. My daughter is dancing to Dick Hyman’s jazz rendition of The Nutcracker Suite. My toddler instructs my mother […]

Jamie xx joined Wayne McGregor and Olafur Eliasson on adapting a ballet rendition of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which opened its world tour this week in New York and is running at the Park Avenue Armory through September 21st. McGregor brought the two artists together and the result is apparently a singularly immersive experience: […]

Alice Munro, a “master of the contemporary short story,” has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. The first Canadian to win, Munro told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: I think my stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories, and I would really hope that this would make people see the short story […]

One summer day in 1985, a doctor calls my mother and tells her that there is empty space where parts of my brain should be. “I don’t understand it,” he says. “There should be muscle, and there’s nothing.” More tests, he mumbles. He’s calling in another specialist. My mother hangs up the phone and starts […]

Jesse Eisenberg, known for playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, has published a Shouts & Murmurs column at The New Yorker titled “My Mother Explains the Ballet to Me.” Characterized by one-sided, rapid-fire conversation, the result is a frank, humorous scene of a mother chastising her adult son at the ballet.

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